-- well, people started taking my shit seriously and it just kind of happened
seriously, I'm not sure telling yourself a curated twitter feed is basically a newspaper (which I guess some people tacitly believe?) makes much sense for how Twitter works or does much good for public discourse/awareness of news
but I'm just a small-circulation historian, so 🤷♂️
It occurs to me that this is more or less the Quillette formula
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No, the consensus was not that the earth was flat. No, Copernicus did not get thrown in jail, by the Church or anyone else. No, scientists are not better authorities on history, even history of science, than historians are.
Much as I’d like to blame evopsych for convincing people that every just-so story is a scientific explanation, that’d be unfair to the many views of non-evolutionary science that are equally based on nothing more than doubling down on feels about Back Then, evidence be damned.
Pretty much this. I think the same goes for a lot of distinctions, both within and between institutions, that systematically favour the already favoured.
NB I think most academic rewards go to people who "merit" them, just like most of the tiny number of TT academic jobs go to eminently qualified candidates. But given the numbers there's just too much of the lottery about the whole business for the language of merit not to rankle.
I don't think anyone should begrudge anyone else their good news! But I guess I think it's naive to expect that further good fortune of people already statistically fortunate enough to have tenured positions won't generate comment on how tilted things look to the majority.
The First Person I Talked to Told Me Something, So I Tweeted It, Says Roving Journalist
"Is that not how this works?"
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MONTREAL, Oct. 10: McGill University, several weeks into its contentious and widely publicized return to campus, was the scene of an extremely hot take today
Objective teaching means teaching ALL possible views of a subject. E.g. History should not just be about what we think happened, but what other people think happened, & what people used to think happened, & what didn't happen but could have, what never happens but might happen, &
if you think about it logically you must conclude that there's no reason to focus on one set of possibilities or opinions rather than another set so the only rational course is to teach every one of them equally and let students decide for themselves what is true without ideology
some of you are saying "oh.. But what about the 'fact' that there's limited time & resources in our modern classrooms." Let me answer your question with a question: You know who else put a price on Truth? Now I will answer that question: Pontius Pilate. Stalin too iirc. No thanks